Survival Boogie Woogie (version anglaise)

What links are there between Piet Mondrian’s unfinished work Victory Boogie Woogie (1942–4) and post-war Japanese and Japanese-style architectural photography?
As far back as the mid-1950s, critics and photographers were inclined to link Mondrian’s painting with modern Japanese architecture and some historians were to go so far as to assert that Mondrian himself had been influenced by traditional Japanese architecture. These powerful associations contributed to the convergence of Western and Japanese architectural modernity. They also underpinned the survival of Japonisme in architecture, or put another way, of the neo-Japonisme that emerged after the Second World War. However, while this kinship between Mondrian’s abstraction and the aesthetic of Japanese architecture is little apparent in architecture, it does show in architectural photography. This book, which takes an oblique look at Mondrian, examines the works of the foremost among Japanese and American architectural photographers to interpret the dynamics of how the world of architecture was Japanized between 1945 and 1985.

Jean-Sébastien Cluzel is professor of the art and archaeology of the Far East in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Sorbonne University. Specializing in the history of Japanese architecture, he oversaw the restoration of the Japanese structures in the Albert-Kahn Garden at Boulogne-Billancourt, supervised the appraisal of the Stork Room for the Musée des Confluences in Lyons and is currently project consultant for the restoration of the cinéma La Pagode in Paris.